Understanding and veritism

<i>Epistemic Values: Collected Papers in Epistemology</i>

Why think that conscious experience of reality is any more epistemically valuable than testimony? I argue that conscious experience of reality is epistemically valuable because it provides cognitive contact with reality. Cognitive contact with reality is a goal of experiential inquiry which does not reduce to the goal of getting true beliefs or propositional knowledge. Such inquiry has awareness of the truth-makers of one’s true beliefs as its proper goal. As such, one reason why conscious experience of reality is more epistemically valuable than testimony about reality is that it gives us more epistemic goods than only true belief or propositional knowledge. I defend this view from two rival accounts. First, that while conscious experience of reality has greater value than testimony, its value is only eudaimonic. Second, that while it has greater epistemic value than testimony, this value is not distinctive: for it only promotes truth better than testimony.

Introduction A major influence on Chomsky’s approach to the study of mind has come from rationalist philosophers such as Descartes. Like these thinkers, Chomsky’s work can be usefully seen in opposition to empiricist approaches to mind articulated by thinkers such as Locke. The aim of this chapter is to provide a conceptual backdrop against which one can locate some of Chomsky’s claims. I try to do this by outlining the different ways that the empiricist and rationalist traditions (actually, idealized versions of each) try to reconcile an apparent tension in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). The tension comes in trying to combine a theory of mind with a theory of truth to yield an account of how it is possible for humans to know anything, i.e. have true beliefs in some domain, especially true beliefs about the “outside world.” The two traditions endorse very different conceptions of the relation of minds to the world. However, it is possible to construct a shared conception of what the epistemological project amounts to that plausibly animates the details of the particular proposals that have been advanced. Doing this, I believe, allows for a better evaluation of the intuitions that drive these programs and thereby permits one to more fully appreciate some of Chomsky’s main philosophical proposals. In what follows, I will try to outline these general conceptions. I will then try to relate them to some of the concerns that Chomsky has raised in his linguistic and philosophical writing.

This chapter provides a detailed and epistemologically informed defense of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and understanding. It responds to Lars Bergström’s criticisms of the value of scientific knowledge. It then devises a naturalistic approach to intrinsic value that is used to argue that true belief (and, in turn, knowledge) is intrinsically valuable because true beliefs are valued for their own sake, and such acts of valuation help to explain the overall scientific worldview. It next considers and rejects Duncan Pritchard’s attempt to show that understanding is more epistemically valuable than true belief, arguing that Pritchard’s view of understanding as a cognitive achievement fails to include anything of epistemic value other than the epistemic value of the true beliefs which are compresent with understanding. Finally, it uses virtue-theoretic approaches to epistemic value to generate prima facie obligations to acquire scientific knowledge and understanding.

Epistemic utility theory (EUT) is generally coupled with veritism. Veritism is the view that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. Veritism, when paired with EUT, entails a methodological commitment: norms of epistemic rationality are justified only if they can be derived from considerations of accuracy alone. According to EUT, then, believing truly has epistemic value, while believing falsely has epistemic disvalue. This raises the question as to how the rational believer should balance the prospect of true belief against the risk of error. A strong intuitive case can be made for a kind of epistemic conservatism – that we should disvalue error more than we value true belief. I argue that none of the ways in which advocates of veritist EUT have sought to motivate conservatism can be squared with their methodological commitments. Short of any such justification, they must therefore either abandon their most central methodological principle or else adopt a permissive line with respect to epistemic risk.

This paper provides a comparative overview of two related, but analytically distinct, issues in the law of defamation. The first is whether the true character of a defamatory statement relieves the defendant from liability. On this issue, the civilian and common-law traditions have historically settled on two markedly different stances, the latter accepting the sufficiency of truth simpliciter while the former never did. Some of the reasons for this distinction are explored. Different is the issue of truthfulness, in the sense of belief in truth. Does it, and should it matter, that a defendant believed that what they said was true albeit (prima facie) defamatory? Should we distinguish on the basis of the ‘quality’ of the belief? This paper argues that reasonable truthfulness ought to be recognised as a defence in the law of defamation. De lege lata, the law has never come up with such a general principle, but observation suggests that it has in fact been beating about the bush for a long time, using other analytical tools. Besides, a number of recent developments internationally can be understood as attempts to get closer to the above position.

Virtue epistemology has long struggled with the “Creditability Dilemma”: how can knowledge gained through deference be creditable to the knower if it primarily depends on others’ cognitive work? We propose a novel solution by developing a telic account of doxastic deference as a distinctive kind of social‐epistemic performance. On our view, such deference succeeds when a deferrer forms a true belief that p in domain d , which answers their query, on the basis of the fact that a deferee states that p because of their epistemically superior competence in d . Drawing on Sosa's framework of performance assessment, we identify a metaphysical hierarchy of increasingly creditable achievements in deferential belief‐formation, from mere accurate doxastic deferral through to fully apt doxastic deferral. This hierarchy reveals that the apparent tension between individual credit and epistemic dependence rests on an “inverse creditability” thesis which fails to apply in cases of deferential belief. Instead, the highest forms of deferential achievement often align with and track the cognitive achievements of those deferred to. This framework also illuminates expert identification and epistemic trespassing as problems of exercising deferential skill under suitably normal conditions.

This paper evaluates whether and to what extent modal constraints on knowledge or the semantics of ‘knows’, which make essential reference to what goes on in other possible worlds, can be considered non-epistemic factors with epistemic significance. This is best understood as the question whether modal factors are non-truth-relevant factors that make the difference between true belief and knowledge, or to whether a true belief falls under the extension of ‘knowledge’ in a context, where a factor is truth-relevant with respect to S’s belief that P iff it bears on the probability that P is true. To the extent that these factors are non-epistemic, epistemologies that endorse them—modal epistemologies—stand in conflict with intellectualism. I focus on three modal epistemologies: safety, sensitivity, and David Lewis’s epistemic contextualism. I argue that prima facie, safety and sensitivity allow that non-epistemic changes in a context can shift the closeness ordering on worlds, and in so doing make a difference to whether S knows P, while Lewis’s contextualism allows that non-epistemic changes in a context can shift the relevant domain of not-P possibilities that must be eliminated for ‘S knows P’ to be true in that context. Then to make her theory compatible with intellectualism, the modal epistemologist must say much more about the notion of probability at play in the definition of ‘truth-relevant’. I suggest that either accepting or rejecting that modal epistemologies are intellectualist has significance consequences for debates between pragmatists and purists, which radiate into wider contemporary epistemology.

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true belief does have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief.

What I wish to consider here is how understanding something is related to the justification of beliefs about what it means. Suppose, for instance, that S understands the name “Clinton” and has a justified belief that it names Clinton. How is S’s understanding related to that belief’s justification? Or suppose that S understands the sentence “Clinton is President”, or Jones’ assertive utterance of it, and has a justified belief that that sentence expresses the proposition that Clinton is President, or that Jones said that Clinton is President. How is S’s understanding related to the justifications of these beliefs? My aim is to explore the following claim. (T) Understanding is an a priori source of immediate prima facie justification for beliefs about what things mean. If knowledge is justified true belief, then, according to (T), true beliefs so justified constitute a priori knowledge. I believe this claim promises to throw interesting new light on the epistemic character and potential of Mind. In order to assess whether (T) is even remotely plausible, several preliminary clarifications are in order. I will begin with some observations about understanding, and then proceed to a discussion of justification. I will conclude with a discussion of a priori justification.

Intractable disagreement among philosophers is ubiquitous. An implication of such disagreement is that many philosophers hold false philosophical beliefs (i.e. at most only one party to a dispute can be right). Suppose that we distribute philosophers along a spectrum arranged from philosophers with mostly true philosophical beliefs on one end (high‐reliability), to those with mostly false philosophical beliefs on the other (low‐reliability), and everyone else somewhere in‐between (call this is the reliability spectrum). It is hard to see how philosophers could accurately locate themselves on the reliability spectrum; they are prima facie as well positioned as their peers with respect to philosophical matters (call this the placement problem). In this paper, I argue that the reliability spectrum and placement problem lend support to modest meta‐philosophical skepticism: we have a pro tanto (but not an all‐things‐considered) reason to withhold ascent to philosophical claims.

All logicians of fiction, and several non-logicians too, take it as a given that logic-based semantics of literary discourse would be seriously incomplete if it omitted to explain how reference, truth and inference operate in such contexts. Logicians, both mathematical and philosophical, have built up a large inventory of approaches and methods for the study of these same things with respect to discourse in general. The dominance of these methods, as well as their applicational flexibility, makes a strong prima facie case for their utility in the examination of reference, truth, and inference in fiction. From page one of this book, I have resisted the suggestion that the prima facie case is strong enough to defy resistance, and throughout the book reasons for resistance have been piling up, some of which I think are deeply hurtful to the prima facie case. Even so, as we have seen, my preferred alternatives lack the backing of large literatures and the research results that large literatures produce. A page ago I said that perhaps the only realistic escape from the tyranny of so large a majority, might be to poke it here and there with enough strategic savvy to get the elaborate apparatus of the formal semantics paradigm to falter under its own heavy weight. I meant this metaphorically. I meant that perhaps we will be able to see that the adaptational costs of model theory are too high for fiction, whatever the good that may be in it for other purposes.

Such activities as tracking, watching, and photographing animals are frequently presented as morally superior alternatives to hunting, but could they themselves be morally problematic? In this paper I argue that, despite certain differences from the stalking of humans, a strong case can be made for the prima facie wrongness of stalking sentient animals. The chief harm of stalking is the fear and altered patterns of behaviour which it forces upon its victims. Similar harms arise for both human and non‐human victims of stalking; thus I argue thatstalking animals is a prima facie, but overridable wrong. Still, a significant disanalogy between stalking humans and stalking animals can be seen in cases in which the victim is unaware of being stalked. I argue that such stalking is generally acceptable with respect to animals, but morally wrong with respect to humans. More generally, it is much harder to justify the stalking of humans than the stalking of animals, given the greater human interest in privacy.

There is impressive, prima facie evidence supporting the view that Karl Marx’s relationship to Charles Darwin should be regarded as a strong case in the history of the interaction between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Consider for example Marx’s straightforward declaration according to which Darwin’s work contained “a scientific basis for the historic class struggle”.1 Or take Friedrich Engels’ emphatic statement at Marx’s graveside: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history”.2 Yet, there is also impressive evidence showing that Marx was unwilling to base his social views direct on biology, and that he thoroughly rejected attempts aimed at explaining social traits away with the natural conditions supporting individuals and societies. Besides, Marx liked to stress discontinuity rather than continuity between the animal world and human societies. So, he pointed out that population dynamics followed different laws among animals and in human societies, and he contrasted animals’ instinctive behavior with man’s goal-directed work. It seems thus fair to say that Marx’s relationship to Darwin is a strong case, above all, in that it shows how entangled the interaction between the natural sciences and the social sciences can be.KeywordsHuman TechnologySocial ViewNatural TechnologyScience NaturellesCentral DecadeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This chapter explains Thomas's genre. The classification of Thomas as a 'wisdom gospel' also runs into difficulties; such a designation implies that there were other 'wisdom gospels' around, such that Thomas could be identified as belonging with them. There is a strong prima facie case for the designation of Thomas as a Gospel. Thomas might also be seen as a 'chreia collection' or 'sentence collection'. On the one hand, some collections such as the Sentences of Sextus have the disadvantage that they are merely γνῶμαι, i. e. single sentences expressing a complete thought. On the other hand, there are some clear similarities. Sentence collections such as those of Sextus can easily tolerate the juxtaposition of unrelated maxims alongside connections made by theme or catchword. Some of the closest analogies to Thomas are the sentence collections of Epicurus, the Kuriai doxai and the Vaticanae sententiae.Keywords: prima facie; Thomas's genre; wisdom gospels